Text by CLOT Magazine
CLOT Magazine editors Lula Criado and Meritxell Rosell will give a talk on May 11, 2019 at the Goldsmiths University London, in the context of the final exhibition of the Digital Arts Computing BSc. They are joining Curator, Producer and Filmmaker Ben Evans James and Rachel Falconer, curator, head of Goldsmiths Digital Studios and lecturer in Computational Arts, to discuss technology’s social and ecological consequences on our world through the lens of digital arts practice. The threads in the very fabric of our existence have become conductive – we must now find new ways of weaving.
Responding to the exhibition theme, For What shall Remain: Repairing and Reconstructing our Digital Entanglement and further discussion, as the technological landscape has changed vastly since the utopian dreams of the early 1990s, human entanglement with technology is no longer an emerging process but has rather become a steadily tightening knot. As digital artists, can we not help but wonder: is it possible to construct a relationship of care and intimacy with technology? How can we apply this to a sustainable art practice in a network that seems to have epitomised capitalist principles? Suppose we are to maintain and repair our digital environment. In that case, it must be possible to develop a relation to technologies not defined by dominance – can this development be considered within the feminist practice?
Lula and Meritxell will discuss editorial perspectives on digital identities and alternative digital realities, showing how techno-capitalist dominance is attempted to be understood and interpreted from different theoretical and artistic angles in the digital art sphere.
They will discuss the techno domination of physical bodies by lab-engineered hormones and porn, the misperception of digital self by AI/social media and how artist Ben Grosser can destabilise these narratives, CCRU and the accelerationist techno-fantasies of Kode9 and Lawrence Lek, the eco-realities of Jakob Kudsk Steensen and radically refreshing new perspectives on the intersection of race, gender and feminist studies with digital culture and technology with collectives such as XENoentities and Hypenlabs and artist and thinker micha cárdenas.
